Liberal democratic states are secular, in the sense that political sovereignty does not rest on religious authority. Beyond this basic separation, however, it is unclear whether, and which secularism is required by liberal-democratic ideals. This chapter puts forward the view that states have liberal legitimacy if they meet the standards of minimal secularism. The three (jointly necessary and sufficient) standards of minimal secularism are personal liberty, equal inclusion and public justification. Each picks out one discrete feature of religion; and there is no need further to separate state and religion, once the standards are met.

Minimal secularism is a distinctive theory of liberal legitimacy, in two ways. First, it allows a plurality of permissible models of state-religion relationships, beyond US- or French-style separation. Second, it does not single out religion as uniquely special but instead connects liberal legitimacy to discrete features of religion (that are shared with non-religious beliefs and practices). The plural standards of liberal legitimacy require that religion be disaggregated.

Minimal secularism fares well in relation to two critiques of, or alternatives to, secularism. First, it is not vulnerable to the claim that it is marked by an ethnocentric legacy of church-state separation, or committed to a Protestant conception of religion. Second, it is more structured and precise than theories of state neutrality towards the good. The lecture is structured as follows. The first section introduces some challenges to secularism; the second develops the neutralist response to them, and the third introduces minimal secularism as a more robust and fuller response.

Cécile Laborde holds the Nuffield Chair of Political Theory and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Before she joined Oxford in 2017, she was a Professor of Political Theory at UCL in London. After studying political science in France, Cécile Laborde obtained a DPhil from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, in 1996. She has held posts in political theory at the University of Exeter and King's College, London. In 2007, she was Associate Professor to the EHESS  in Paris. She spent the 2010-11 academic year in Princeton, as a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. She was the director of UCL’s Religion and Political Theory Centre. 

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. She is a scholar and writer, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is the author of the award-winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Harvard, 2012). 

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